This Week in Rixflix #17: June 30 – July 6, 2017

As far as I can see, the real problem with TCM's online course this summer is timing. They have secured two days a week throughout July on their network in order to showcase just over 40 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but they started the online course that corresponds with the films well over a week ahead (in June instead) of the first night's viewing. Unfortunately, the course started out diving right into Hitch's numerous silent features, movies with which even longtime aficionados of either classic film or Alfred Hitchcock may not have much experience. I fall into both categories and I have only seen The Lodger (1927) from his silent days. Well, until this week, when I snuck in an iPad viewing of his boxing romance, The Ring, while visiting my father up in Idaho (where I am currently).

I had planned to dive right into the Hitchcock course from the start, and while I read through the materials thoroughly more than once, games come up in the course where they ask questions using images from films I have yet to see because they haven't aired yet. Yes, I can take things over and over again as much as I want to get the score I wish, but it is a matter of pride that I do things right from the beginning. The first night of TCM's airings of Hitch's silents and early sound films wouldn't happen until July 5th – when I would already be in Idaho – and so I decided that I would use my time up here to work on the module for the silent part of the course on either my iPad or iPhone. Now, it has turned out that using the Canvas app to do the online course is pretty damn tedious and more than a little annoying. Also, TCM only about half selection of the evening's eight aired films up on their Watch TCM app, so I can't even see everything I would rather see before taking the first week's exam.

As a result of all of these problems, I have decided on the following plan: 1) watch the films I can on the Watch TCM app in my remaining days in Idaho, 2) watch the other films (that I don't already own) on my DVR when I get home, 3) don't do anything with the course until I get home, where I can use my computer and not have to worry about a creaky, unreliable app, and 4) make sure everything is watched before preceding with the testing. I may have to cram most of my work into a couple of weeks, but I think it will go smoothly.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 18; 15 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length films: Loving (2016) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – 8/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: The Sand [aka Blood Sand] (2015) – 3/9
Average films per day in June: 3.1667
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 205

The Reviews:

Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.

I needn't have worried. Right now, I am just mad that I didn't see this film on a big screen, because it would have wowed my socks right off my feet. Berg conveys such a slowly tightening and eventually crushing sense of suspense to this terrible disaster upon nature and our oceans that I am kicking myself that I didn't pay closer attention to everything related to the film on its release. Wahlberg himself is spot on as the rig tech who finds himself in the middle of an increasingly dangerous situation, as are Kurt Russell as the rig supervisor and John Malkovich as an especially slimy oil company exec who ignores necessary testing early on and wants operations to continue despite warnings. Also from the trailers, which added to my initial negative reaction, I had a sense that this would turn into just another action thriller, where Marky Mark would rip off his sleeves and save everybody on the oil rig. Again, if I had just trusted that they were going more towards telling the story as accurate as possible (by Hollywood standards) then I needn't have worried. Yes, there is action aplenty and Wahlberg does have to do some rescuing, but it is consistent with the tone of the picture and it never turns into a John McClane-style film. I look back now and realize my initial reactions were a bit flip, and hadn't taken into account that there was a very real loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon and that Berg would care more about honoring their deaths than in amping up the action quotient to sell movie tickets. That's on me for not thinking more seriously about this at the top. In the end, I really enjoyed this tough as nails film. This rating for Deepwater Horizon may go up after the next time I watch it. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.) 

The film itself has many humorous moments, but there is another darker level to this film that lends the film a quality which takes it out of the normal horror-comedy range (besides the musical element). Levy's character is not the simple, goody two-shoes character you expect from the way the film opens. She drinks like a fish when she is sad, she relies a bit too much on a fantasy life built around her romance with an Elvis-like pop idol, and endures abuse and rape from an obsessive creep in her town. Meanwhile, unspecified medical experiments are taking place in the town that is turning much of the populace (and the local wildlife) into mutated freaks. The more horrific elements of the story are pretty much tamped down until late in the film, and while they never go quite as far as I'd like, their impact is felt pretty hard when they finally appear. Having the villain grow a second mouth in his neck so he trades off lines in his big song with himself is a pretty neat idea, and the scene featuring townsfolk gathering to down "suicide drinks" en masse is heavy stuff for a musical. The film itself has a thick edge of surreality to the proceedings, so that it becomes hard to tell which of the heroine's lives is the fantasy and which is the reality. Or if either (or any) of them are at all. 

I run hot and cold with the musical score, which I feel plays it too safe and low-key much of the time. I kept waiting for one of the earlier numbers to really kick it into high gear. Even the title song, which occurs at the halfway mark of the film and is an uptempo song with a big dance break and wacky sound effects, looks too much like a rehearsal done at half-speed and never really takes off like I wish it would. (It should be the big, goofy, joyous center of this film.) I could not help the feeling that the storytellers never really commit to the notion of a full musical. There are several scenes that could have benefited from being told in song instead, and would have livened the film immensely, but St. Jules settles for more exposition via dialogue in its place. Still, there is an overall weirdness that I find quite compelling and whatever doesn't work in the film is outweighed by the things that do. And I really like a couple of the lines from the score, such as "So, marry me; there's worse things you can do/In a quarantined town of freaks, choices are few." Who hasn't thought that about their own hometown? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school. 

All that has changed. If you put something stupid on YouTube, scores of absolute dopes will try to replicate or even outdo that something stupid. (As I heard recently on the news, stupidity is quite catching... and yes, it was about you know who and his goons.) If you put out a book that tells readers how to build simple bombs and grenades and any number of other things that could help you in waging a revolution against a government or protecting yourself and your family against armed insurgents, some of those readers will apparently make real, definite use out those instructions. Documentarian Charlie Siskel – the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel – has built American Anarchist around his interviews with William Powell, a professor who was only 19 years of age when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970. He spent the last 47 years of his life hiding from his legacy (he died this year in March), living in a deep state of denial over what his book brought to the fore in our society. Siskel doesn't mince words and goes after Powell (and his wife) hard, giving him opportunity after opportunity to explain his actions and outright apologize for them as well. Powell mostly tries to evade Siskel's traps, and gets very angry a couple of times over the filmmaker's persistence on this one question. In some ways, the film does get a tad one-note with this repetitive stance, but in telling us the story surrounding the infamous book and its creator, Charlie Siskel has given us a fascinating look into the power of words to do real harm; sometimes, even murder. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Psychotronic Ketchup: Blackout (1978)

Director: Eddy Matalon
New World, 1:28, color
Cast Notables: Robert Carradine; Jim Mitchum; Belinda Montgomery; Ray Milland; June Allyson; Jean-Pierre Aumont
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

I would never have given Blackout the time of day if its title hadn't appeared in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

One of the few negative things about that volume is that it spends an inordinate amount of time with disaster movies. Sure, disaster movies can be fun (especially in an unintentional way), and they certainly fulfill the special effects aspect with which most films of the psychotronic sort find themselves involved. Certainly a case can also be made that disaster movies are not that far removed from monster flicks, with the earthquake or flood or, in this case, the city-wide blackout (and the reaction of the citizenry to its installation) substituting for the giant monster that would normally kill, maim, stop and generally terrify the people of the film.

But that is really pushing it as far as interest goes. After all the big effects used to bring to life the main star of the film -- the disaster itself -- disaster films most often boil down, at least for me, to simply being rote actioners or dramas. Each one seems to exist on a set number of predictable crises that most in the main cast will fail one by one to get past, a series of often poorly acted (often by overrated veteran actors) character scenes that set up the various reasons why this person should live and why this one should die, and one steadfast hero who will lead the survivors through to the end. There might be a modicum of surprising twists, but usually not much that veers too far away from the standard template. In these ways too, disaster films are much like monster films. Only the monster films are far weirder even in just conception, let alone actions, and deserve simply via that weirdness alone a definite place in a book of outré cinema, even the most average of entries in the monster genre. The problem I have with disaster films being in the Psychotronic Guide is that disasters are happening every single day somewhere in this world, natural or man-made. Disasters are a common reality, and therefore, the films concerning them are much, much too far from the usual head trip that a decent psychotronic movie should portray or invoke in the viewer.

Even so, the Psychotronic Encyclopedia has within it Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Rollercoaster is in there, and so are the films in the Airport quartet. Again, because all of these are big-budget, special effects flicks, I can understand the impetus to put them in the book. Other tempting reasons for the author are probably their crazy-quilt, all-star casts, their unintentional humor, and inherent campiness. And I do like some of these films, and not just in an ironic way. I simply don't agree with the decision to put them in the book. I find the movies too stifling banal to go alongside something as goofy as The Hideous Sun Demon. But its not my book, except by purchase, so it was never my decision what to include. The disaster films are in the book all the same, and if I don't really care for them or find them monotonous, well, it's my own fault for coming up with a gimmick like trying to watch every film in the Psychotronic. All I can do is deal with them.

And thus, I run into a plain wanna-be disaster flick called Blackout, from New World Pictures in 1978. And then, once I find Blackout actually is available on DVD (one of the extra steps that is required in seeing these films), per my own rules, I have to rent and watch it.

Blackout has its own version of an all-star cast. It has the son of a real movie star as the dull but earnest hero (Jim Mitchum), it has the brother of two more famous actors as the crazed anarchist villain (Robert Carradine, and he is pretty effective in this), it has two old-timey movie stars in small roles (Ray Milland, one of my favorites and as grumpy as ever, and June Allyson, in her final screen role), and this Canadian production even goes for some international verve with the casting of Gallic film legend Jean-Pierre Aumont in another small, tragic role as a washed-up magician. But that's about it for the phrase "all-star". Unless you count Belinda Montgomery, whom you may not know, but whom I adored as a kid when she played the hottie doctor/love interest of Patrick Duffy on The Man from Atlantis TV series. And unless you count the porky, recognizable guy working in the city electric control center, who chomps his cigar muttering indecipherable epithets and instructions to his crew while all hell breaks loose and the city is plunged into a Stygian darkness.

Blackout is a big-budget disaster action film produced by people who only have about a tenth of the coffers they need to do so. This is fine. I am a tremendous fan of low-budget productions, where tenacity and filmmaking wit can bring about wondrous delight. Not here, though there are a couple of surprisingly tense action scenes (especially the closing battle between Mitchum and Carradine in a parking garage. You can always count on the '70s for some jarringly rough car action.) Needing to portray a citywide blackout without actually having a full city to blackout, the filmmakers place most of the concentration of their film on a single hi-rise tower, where a group of criminals who use the advantage of the blackout to escape from a police van, run amok and torment the mostly helpless people trapped inside the building. Mitchum is the tough cop who practically stumbles onto this rampage, and it is hard to not think of Die Hard when watching this, even if the films are miles apart in execution and design. Or quality, for that matter.

Cop Mitchum will do the following once he enters the building: rescue rape victim Montgomery and enlist her aid, while she is clearly in shock from being ravaged mere moments before; discover people trapped in an elevator; shoot down the rapist; mistakenly take Carradine into his trust; escape from being electrocuted; put out a fire; and also singlehandedly battle the entire gang, including most of the members in solo duels. It seems like a lot for one guy to handle in a single evening -- almost a cop version of After Hours, stuck inside one loony building which almost seems to stand in as a miniaturization of any point in the human universe -- but there is so much more in which he could have been involved. A baby is born amongst all this chaos, the child of the lady trapped in the elevator starts wandering throughout the building, and there is a Greek wedding on a higher floor that decides that the only way to get through all of this is to party, party, party! And people get murdered here and there.

A sharper group of filmmakers could have actually done something with this that didn't feel so by the book at every turn. (I think of how tense and muscular John Carpenter made what could have been a generic Rio Bravo rip in Assault on Precinct 13.) Once you accept just how cynical and unforgiving these criminals are, and once you get their individual tics down, all surprise is erased from the script. You know exactly where everything is going to end up, and you know who is going to live and who is going to die. In their effort to be part of the disaster trend of that era, in replicating the vapidity and predictability of their predecessors, the makers of Blackout probably considered their barely interesting product to be a success. It is certainly so if they indeed made money off this project. There is no art involved here, just commerce. That's not a crime, especially in the movie-making world, and if you are looking for filler when there are so many more entertaining things surrounding us -- well, if you are that type of person, then look no further. Consider your time filled and your standards average.

But this film is in no way "psychotronic." Perhaps I will just use some Liquid Paper to excise it and its boring ilk from the book once I am finished "accidentally" seeing films that shouldn't be in there. No one said I can't decide which films should be in the book after I've bought it...